


if only they blocked youtube in japan

by satsukichan



Category: Kill la Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bad Decisions, Comedy, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Nonon is a musical snob even when she has shitty taste, mentions of skrillex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 10:12:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1895199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satsukichan/pseuds/satsukichan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nonon gets really into dubstep for a few weeks. She and everyone else would much rather forget it ever happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if only they blocked youtube in japan

“You cannot be serious.”

The smaller figure ripped the earbuds out of her head and glared at the boy smiling sheepishly at her. “You listen to this shit?”

“It’s fun. It gets me hyped.”

She glared at him.

“It makes for a good workout playlist?”

“It’s trash! Is this it?”

“Is this what?

“Is this is what the masses listen to?”

“What, do you expect us all to listen to Beethoven? Bach? The Rent soundtrack?”

“Anything is better than this filth.”

“Jeez, you don’t have to be so nasty about it.”

Nonon sighed and leaned against the bed. The summer warmth usually lulled her to sleep, and she would have been perfectly happy to fall asleep like this, sitting on the floor of his room, her head on his shoulder, arm around hers, comfortable in their shared space, but her indignation at the disgusting screaming noises that her boyfriend insisted on listening to when she wasn’t around filled her with righteous fury.

“We have to get you something better to listen to.”

“Maybe you might like it if you listened to more of it?” Uzu scrolled through the tiny mp3 player in his hand before she grabbed it irritably and threw it out of his reach. “HEY-”

“You’re going to listen to some actual music. What do you like?”

“Me? Uh, the Beatles? Rolling Stones, ACDC, Nirvana, Metallica, anything on the radio, EDM-”

“How the fuck could I date someone with the music taste of an eighth grader with access to Youtube?”

“I thought you just said-”

“I still mean it. Anything is better then that-” She paused. “What did you say it was called?”

“Dubstep? That was by Skrillex-”

“Dubstep. Really, I expected better from you. I’m not sure why, but I did.”

They sat there for a few more minutes in silence before she braced herself against Uzu’s shoulder and planted her feet against the floor to push herself into a standing position. He looked mildly disappointed.

“You’re already leaving?”

“I’m using the music you told me you liked to figure out what bands you might be interested in, and some classical stuff for good measure. Anything to rid you of that AWFUL buzzing noise.”

He huffed. She wasn’t in the mood to protest. The sun lingered enticingly through the window, and despite how tempted she was to stay on the floor, cuddling with him, duty called. There was no way she could look him in the eye and think about him listening to scum like that and call herself a good girlfriend, or musical major. She was going to educate him on music if it killed her.

 

* * *

 

As it turned out, the vague musical direction he’d given her hadn’t helped. It’d been hours in front of her computer without any reprieve from the constant neurological onslaught of music, popular, unpopular, well known, yet to be discovered, old, new, recent, living, classic, dead-

A stray link caught her eye. The newest music video for that artist (if she could even call him that) Uzu had mentioned in passing was being promoted. A glance at the number of views the video had after only hours had her grimacing in disgust. Why were they so popular? Where was the humanity? How could there possibly exist a world in which people would prefer to listen to music- garbage, really- that resembled a machine gun going off in a steel locker over the orchestral sweep of the masters, long dead and turned to dust? The classics were eternal, and and the very least, she should be able to convince Uzu to listen to the faster pieces.

Another link, a few videos down, peaked her interest much more. A fanmade remix of In The Hall of The Mountain King and another single from that- Skrillex, was it? was also extremely popular.

Nonon’s pointer hovered over it, unsure.

Then the sad list of bands Uzu had listed echoed in her head, and she shrugged. What the hell? If she could introduce the classics to him, this was a neutral starting point. She could start with these hellish remixes and ease him into the good stuff. And after all, f it was remixed with something good, how bad could it possibly be? It would be like a mother sneaking vegetables to her children in the form of baked sweets. A poisonous grin spread over her face as she imagined Uzu animatedly talking about the wonders of Vivaldi.

She clicked on the video.

 

* * *

 

Uzu had not seen Nonon in three days, and frankly, it was starting to worry him.

After she’d promised to return soon with recommendations of music he’d enjoy only a few days ago, he hadn’t seen her. At all. It was as if she’d vanished into thin air. Usually, if she left abruptly, she’d reappear a few hours later, or send him a snarky text in the middle of the night. At latest, he’d see her the following morning, but now it was Saturday afternoon and he had not been able to make contact with her in three days. Nobody else had seen her either, and although she hadn’t left the campus (he’d had Houka check the security footage), the concern was too much. Maybe he’d listen to her dusty old composers. Maybe she was avoiding him? He didn’t know she’d been so hurt when he’d made fun of her taste in music.

In any case, if she was avoiding him, there was only one place he hadn’t checked. His fist hovered a few centimeters over the surface of the polished wood, soundproofed to avoid eavesdropping, and hesitated. Would she really be in her dorm room on a weekend evening? Nonon, who loved to socialize, who would usually be with him on a date or out with her friends? Maybe she’d run away?

_Impossible,_ reasoned the voice in his head. _There’s no way Nonon would dump you or run away without leaving some sort of snarky note in your room. She’d never be able to resist one last dig at him or your ego._

The voice in his head left him no doubt. For some weird, unexplained reason, Nonon Jakuzure, his girlfriend, had to be in her room on a Saturday night. He knocked smartly, three clear, loud knocks that echoed in the hallway, empty of other students, enjoying their weekends as college students were apt to do. There was a few seconds where he thought the room must be empty after all, and then the sound of the deadbolt sliding shut brought his focus back to the door in front of him.

Nonon peeked through the crack between the doorframe and the heavy wood, and she looked terrible.

This was not a very nice way to think about his girlfriend, but her eyes, always big, were huge and hollow in the dark recesses of her skull. There were bags- bags he’d never seen before, the kind brought on by lack of sleep- under her eyes. Nonon, resident princess of Honnouji Hall, not getting the beauty sleep she required- no, _DEMANDED?_

Something was afoot, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was.

“Are you… _okay?_ ”

Her eyes were slightly out of focus, but they slid up to meet his. It took everything he had to keep from flinching- she resembled some sort of zombie, dead behind the glassy walls of her eyes. “Hmm? Yeah. I haven’t slept since the morning I saw you last.”

_“WhAT?”_

There was no way he’d heard that right. Nonon, not sleeping? This was the girl that, despite the snake kanji in her name, was more catlike than anyone he’d ever met before, with all the habits of the felidae family, up to and including the tendency to sleep as much as humanly possible. Fear took hold in the pit of his stomach, and his mouth dried as he went to ask the next question.

“Are you… under the influence?”

Her eyebrow quirked. “I’m a bit peaky, but I’ve only had coffee?”

“No stimulants? Amphetamines? Cocaine? Speed?” He paused. “Ecstasy?”

“The only illegal drugs I’ve done in the last week came out of a bong and we shared that dimebag. I’m fine. Are you okay?”

“Are you okay? You don’t look too hot…”

“Are you saying I look ugly?”

“You’re always gorgeous, but right now you look like you got hit by a truck. What the fuck happened?”

He’d thought her eyes were dead before, but something gleamed in them, and suddenly Uzu was afraid.

“So I was on youtube, right, after you left? And I thought I could talk you into listening to some of the classics if I started you off with something more your color, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But then I decided to keep going.”

That was it. He looked at her quizzically.

“And?”

She opened her room in response.

Every spare inch of her room was covered in signed posters of dubstep heavyweights. Signed posters. Rare posters. Concert exclusive posters. His mouth went from dry to desert like and a cold sweat prickled at the nape of his neck. The overnight shipping tubes on the floor lay like deserted bombshells and packing peanuts crunched under his feet as he walked into what was once a safe space, stacked with cds of DJs he recognized and many more he didn’t. The noise of what he now recognized to be a recent Zedd release echoed in the back of his consciousness, blaring into his skull. He turned to look at her and recognized the shirt from the Rio tour of 2011.

“Nonon.”

“Yes?” She turned at him with a huge beaming smile on her face, and if he’d thought he’d been scared before, he’d been sorely mistaken.

“Holy shit.”

 

* * *

 

That night, they made love.

Uzu was not sure if it was love, or if it was even the right phrase, but he wasn’t sure of a lot of things right at the moment. He lay in bed, completely spent, with the mixtape Nonon had made for the event still blaring in the background.

In all honesty, the correct term was probably something closer to furious jackhammering, because the almost violent act of sex that had taken place was more akin to something that one would see at a construction site than a porno. Almost idly, he tied off the used trojan and dropped it into the wastebin by her bed, where it slid off a box from Amazon and fell into the cracks between the eBay stamped envelope and the unmarked box with the return address from Germany. He did not want to think about the amount of money involved in procuring this much merchandise. His estimations were grim, but he was still probably off a few zeroes. Rich people were terrifying.

“I think you bruised my uterus,” she muttered from underneath his arm. “But I guess I should be lucky. That’s the deepest you’ve ever gotten, and the deepest you’ll ever go, probably.

“Not my fault you wanted to go to the beat.”

“-but it’d better be the fastest, because if you ever come that fast again, I’m putting myself back onto the market. Girls are rarely ever this disappointing.”

“Well, I’m SORRY I couldn’t last through that bass drop.”

“Bangarang isn’t even the fastest one.”

“Well then, I’m so sorry I couldn’t bang you through Bangarang.”

“I guess it’s not your fault. Fucking to dubstep doesn’t seem like a good idea in retrospect.”

“You _think?_ ”

There were cold feet pressing at the muscles at his back, and he whined as she used her weight to shove him off the bed.

“Nononnnnnn…”

“Fuck you. I’m sleepy.”

Nonon let out a painful sounding yawn, the kind that came with the cracking noise of her jaw threatening to give out. “I’m never staying up for this long again. I hate coffee. I can’t stop shaking.”

Indeed, she was jittery, and she hadn’t been able to stop shaking the entire time he’d held her close. It didn’t help he’d been pounding her like a sticky key on an old laptop, but she’d been wild eyed since he’d come in.

“I just hope you’re okay,” he muttered, but she was already asleep. Half naked and surrounded by the dark posters on the walls of the room, he reached for the computer that was still blaring some particularly fast paced song, and hit the spacebar to pause it. Suddenly his eyes were droopy too, and he curled up on the floor, tired out by the evening and the weird, rough sex, and the entire ridiculous turn his day had taken. Maybe he’d done some bad shrooms, and he’d wake up to find Nonon yelling at him for listening to Deadmau5 and tripping too hard and passing out on her throw rug.

 

* * *

 

Except he woke up the next morning, and the day after, and every day that next week, and then the next, and the one after that, to find her more bizarrely, genuinely, deeply interested in dubstep. It was everywhere- leaking out of her earbuds as she curled up at the edge of his bed, in the background of their weekly makeout sessions every Wednesday between his remedial calculus class and her music theory at 4 pm, on her computer as they rutted against the wall of her dorm room (although luckily, for the sake of his endurance and her pleasure, to much slower songs this time around). It wasn’t that he disliked dubstep, but the oversaturation was starting to get to him, amongst other things.

Because dubstep or no dubstep, Nonon was a music geek through and through, and took her major very seriously. He’d caught her scribbling in her notebook more than once, the notes he could read from his brief stint as the designated campus Wonderwall guitar douche looking awfully familiar to the opening of a Noisia song.

But of course, it wouldn’t be Nonon if his worry for her weren’t tinged with an air of defeat. Of course, she had to know more about everything musically related, a secret compulsion he was sure was fueling what seemed to be a desperate desire to not only memorize every half decent artist that made anything even vaguely resembling dubstep, but to absorb them. Leaning against his shoulder the way she had only a week prior, she ripped his earbuds out in disgust. “Really? Don’t you know anything besides the mainstream shit they play on the radio?”

“Wha-”

“And not every song needs to have a fucking bass drop. Jesus, you need to expand out a bit more.” She pulled out the infernal notebook, and he noticed her hands shaking as she did. “I’ve got to write you some recommendations.

“Nonon.”

“Hm?”

“When was the last time you slept properly?”

They made eye contact. Her eyes were bloodshot. It took a significant amount of self control to keep himself from wincing visibly.

“Define properly.”

_“Nonon.”_

“Look. Finals are in a few weeks, and I have an idea for my project-”

“Wait. You’re not really thinking of-”

“It’ll be avant-garde!”

“No. Listen to me, Nonon.” His arms closed over her upper arms, and he pulled her towards him firmly. “You need to calm down. You’ve been drinking too much coffee-”

“I am fine, Uzu-”

“No, you’re not. Look at yourself.”

She glanced down at herself. Her usually immaculate attire was covered in crumbs from the convenience store sweet buns she’d been living off of, and the Knife Party shirt she’d recently received in the mail had a tiny coffee stain at the hem. On anyone else, they’d be signs of a regular college student, and on her, they could easily be mistaken for her having a rough night and sleeping over at his dorm, but this weird college experiment was starting to take a toll on her. He could see it in the way her eyes darted away when he looked into them, bleary from too little sleep and too much caffeine. Uzu’d had enough. This was an intervention.

“Nonon. You tried to fuck me to fucking Skrillex. You have to get a grip on yourself.”

“Oh my god.”

There it was. The edge to her voice, the one that nothing could hide for too long.

The legendary Jakuzure snark.

“What have I done?”

Even he shuddered at the growing horror in her voice. Soothingly, he rubbed a hand down her arm as she stared blankly at her knees, chalk white and starting to shake.

“It’s alright-”

“No it most certainly is NOT.”

Without warning, she grabbed ahold of the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head in one go. He stuttered, not having expected to see her strip so suddenly, or even violently. “Nonon- hold up-”

“When’s your next class.”

It was a statement, not a question.

“Um, forty five min-”

“Skip it.”

“What-”

“I said skip it. We’re going to destroy any and all evidence that the last three weeks ever fucking happened and you’re going to help me burn everything.”

“Dude, that shit’s worth a lot of money-”

“Then you take it. I don’t want to see any of this shit ever again, I can’t believe I-”

She cut herself off and shuddered again. “We’re going to get rid of it, then I want you to pack us a bowl with that good Hawaiian shit I know you have in your sock drawer, and we’re never to speak of this again.”

 

* * *

 

The next time Bangarang came up on shuffle, he looked both ways to make sure Nonon was out of earshot, or even his line of sight, before pausing the song and deleting it, along with everything else, off his mp3 player.

**Author's Note:**

> The first of a series of uzunon/elite four-centric oneshots to be published in between other projects! Inspired by tumblr user triple-q's mashup up of Bangarang and Nonon's theme. My tumblr is satsukichan, if you want to ask any questions!


End file.
